From: angelica
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 14:50:49 -0800

Dear all, I write non-fiction using fictional techniques: rule of three, foreshadowing, cliffhangers at the ends of chapters, arranging documented quotations to look like dialogue, using lots of quotations (I read somewhere that children prefer books with many quotation marks), etc. I think most people would agree that these techniques are fair and maybe even creative. Of course "documented," i.e. printed dialogue is just as likely to be invented as accurately quoted in many cases, especially in newspaper stories. And it is okay for biographers like me to quote other people's invented dialogue, like Frances Hodgson Burnett's remembered conversations in her autobiography _The One I Knew the Best of All_. As a librarian I know the rules about this kind of thing, but as a writer I know that the lines are blurry between invented and real quotations. I heard a discussion recently by reviewers of Rhoda Blumberg's _Shipwrecked: The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy_. The boy has been marooned on an island, eating seagulls, for months or years (I forget) and then he gets rescued. On the second ship, when he saw land, Blumberg said that he was "thrilled." The review rating was lowered because she had not documented this one word. Was this judgement justified? Wouldn't 100% of all people have been thrilled in that situation? Is there any such thing as the reasonable person test? These are questions I ponder daily and so I have followed this week's discussion with great interest. Best wishes, Angelica Carpenter, Curator, Arne Nixon Center for Children's Literature
Received on Fri 05 Apr 2002 04:50:49 PM CST